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Current Reading: Myths of the North American Indians, by Lewis Spence

Inspirational Quote: "Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment." -- Jim Horning

How did I react to the query critique I received?

Short version: facepalm.

Visual version:


Verbose version: Um... I knew all that. I did. I really did.

I've read agent blogs like Query Shark and Evil Editor and Miss Snark and Nathan Bransford. I know what makes a good query.

But, as Morpheus said, "There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path," and in this case, I busted my GPS and walked off into the wilderness. I had thought I was providing sufficient detail. I thought I was providing concrete incidents from the work. I thought I was providing a coherent, succinct summation of the plot. Yet I was uneasy. It just didn't seem right to me, and I couldn't see why. After reading through the Rejectionist's comments, I could see why.

I believe I've said this before, but the best criticism is the stuff that echoes what a little voice in the back of your mind has been trying to tell you.

Some might find her tone insufficiently gentle. I disagree. It is difficult to make a point with sufficient force to penetrate a writer's natural defenses while not arousing the whole to general warfare. For me, her intended audience, the tone was perfect - enough humor to keep it light, but sufficient acid to etch the important points into my consciousness. She did not spare my feelings (nor did I ask them to be spared). She told me what I needed to hear, and for that I'm grateful.

So: my reaction? "Jeeze. I can't believe I wasted a good opportunity by sending in this piece of crap." Then I got over myself and reread the agent blog posts about queries and googled "query letter" and thought about things a long time. And then I started from scratch and wrote a couple dozen MORE versions of my query. What resulted is the query that I really wish I'd sent instead of this one, because it contains less suck, and I really feel it needs only a tiny nudge, a change of perspective, an insight, that could move it to suck-free.

This is a delusion, of course. It too is sucktastic, and further feedback might help me turn it into something merely lame, but at some point I have to start listening to that voice at the back of my head, grow up and start developing my own ability to recognize quality. To that end, I suspect I have more reading and writing to do before this thing ceases to be loserific.

And thus, like Edison, we approach success by beating failure to death.